You’ve heard it before, with that condescending edge in other adults’ voices.
You’re too sensitive. You’re making a fuss. You’re laying it on thick. All to politely tell you an adult should not be that sensitive. That you ought to get past childhood and become a proper grown-up — the sort who manages their emotions.
You’ve heard it before: you’re too soft on your children. With you they let their guard down, they are themselves, they feel safe. But to everyone else they are simply badly brought up, and you ought to tighten things up.
You’ve heard your own family let slip: with us, they’re fine. They sleep right through. Meaning, plainly, that you are the problem. Sometimes they push the argument further: you need to take charge again. They’ll walk all over you. They’re becoming spoilt.
And what if what the world calls your weakness were, in truth, your resource?
You have not let go of something most adults ended up locking away: empathy. That capacity to feel another’s pain without taking on their place.
Every child in the world has it. They want to help, to pick up the dropped pen, to move closer to another child in tears. Then many of us were hurt, and we shut the door on what felt like too much to feel.
What is left, then, are those who choose helping professions. And you — the deeply involved parents.
You feel it, don’t you? When the child suffers and cries. You feel it, don’t you? When they resist, when they want to be heard. You have banished the words tantrum and manipulation from your vocabulary the moment a child is concerned.
You accept the words weak and coddling thrown in your face. Because punishing a child asking to be heard — even through clumsy behaviour — would be a betrayal of your soul.
This is not indulgence. You do not turn a blind eye to harmful behaviour. You do not play ostrich by telling yourself he’s only a child, he’s sweet, he has the right to step on someone else’s toes. You have understood: every human being has a right to respect, whatever their age, whatever their origin.
You are not alone.
You were led to believe that IQ made for success. Dr Marc Brackett reminds us it is EQ — the emotional quotient — that is the rare resource of accomplished people.
Emotions are to us what road signs are to a driver. When you understand the signs and drive properly, you are handed a licence. And yet in the world of adults, we keep on driving while ignoring the signals, the calls and the messages the body sends to help us navigate life.
You do not ignore them. Not in yourself, and not in your children.
It is a gift. It is also a weight. No one ever taught you to carry both together — and when the weight becomes too heavy, it has a name: parental burnout.
The gestures exist — they are not here.
This article sets out the why. The why of a tiredness that does not lift with a night’s sleep. The why of the “too much” you are reproached for. It does not hand over the gestures.
The gestures that ease things — the ones that let you hold on without losing yourself — are in Le Recours, the free booklet the house offers in exchange for a simple email.
It is short. It is made to be read on an evening that is one too many.
IMPERFECT, WHOLE.